MULTIPLAYER RACING PAGE

Archieved TEN News Articles

8/5/98

One of the racers from the online league posted this so I thought I would put this in the whats new for TEN.

Here is the latest news on the development front:

- In the next few days, a new Arena will be added toAbyss.
- Concentric is in the process of re-locating their Network Operations Center, which may cause periodic connection problems for Concentric users. Check out the System News at http://home.concentric.net for detailed information.
- The maximum number of racers in a race has been increased to 24 on all tracks, except for tracks that do not support enough pit stalls. Those tracks are: Sears Point (22), South Boston (23) and Nazareth (23).
- The restriction on minimum number of racers required that was set to two with the last release will be fixed in the next month and be set back to 1 to allow people to practice with only one driver.
- Charlie Heath at Papyrus has been busy fixing a few things as well, including a nasty bug in the enablers that would cause both 'session transition boots' and a 'no-warning-while-driving boot'. Currently we are testing these new enablers and when they are ready,
they will be released on TEN.
- Charlie is also working on improving the quality of the timing/scoring system, so lap times will be more accurate and there won't be "phantom" warp-laps that get scored. We're expecting to begin testing a new race server for this fix shortly

5/30/98

There has now been a merger with several groups to kick off a new BGN league series. These groups are the Speedys league, the AOL league, Simulator Cyberworld, and the SSCRA98 racing league. Each group will coordinate and support this new series. The head Director of the series is Scott Dillner with several support personel. Go to online league for more details and personel running the league.

5/20/98

TEN has now added all the BGN tracks in which you now need to buy the BGN track pack to race on these new tracks. The amount of racers are now up to 22 racers per race event. Stability problems still exist with racers getting booted periodically from race events.

5/8/98

There is still not much new happening on TEN lately. Another Run time update puts us up to version 1.3.9.8 which didn't seem to help the Nascar 2 online racing arenas with the stability problems everyone has been having. I am constantly getting either booted or alot of warping. The nros.com web site has not updated us with any news of fixes for TEN and Nascar 2. We are all still anticapating the new Busch tracks to come(no dates yet).

I have been using my Verbal Commander voice recognition unit during racing with the "Speedy" league and I am fine tweaking my commands to work with racing with the league. I will be writing a small article on my usage of Verbal Commander and racing on TEN.

I have joined a league called "Speedys" and have done 5 races with them so far. They are a great group of racers to compete against. There is no horseplay in this group, just serious clean racing. Most of our complaints are steered toward TEN and warping problems which makes it hard for us to do close competitive racing at all times. Most of their races are 35-40% with varied settings and we race on Wednesday nights at 9:00 PM EST. They do have a few longer races which are called 100% Ironman. There we race the complete 250-500 mile race on that track. Our first one is at Michigan tonight.

Still advertizing for our SSCRA98 league to get enough racers to kick off the series. Please contact thayer@nsource.com for more information if interested. League is run be Chris Keenan and Dave Thayer(myself).

4/25/98

There is not much new going on with TEN lately other then one new Run time update. There is still a stability problem during races by getting booted out of the race and back to the main race arenas. To prevent minimum booting, try to shut off everything that is not necessary on the WIN95 desktop. I found out that shutting down the Virus Protector program helped my quite alot. We are all still waiting for the Busch tracks to arrive on TEN. No proposed dates yet on the new tracks.

Dave Thayer(Daterror - Ten Handle)

3/21/98

This is the following server changes that have taken place on TEN for Nascar 2:

A race will not be scored for a driver who disconnects, or gets booted from the practice, qualify or warmup sessions.
The viewing race in pits/perpetual yellow flag bug has been fixed.
An unclearable black flag bug when entering closed pits has been fixed.
The scoring algorithm has been optimized so there should be fewer cases of races not scoring.
If a driver drives around the track the wrong direction for more than 3 seconds, they will disappear to drivers driving the proper direction and will not cause damage to other drivers. The driver driving the wrong way will, however, incur damage if hit but will not cause damage to drivers going the proper direction.

3/20/98

The TEN periodic news letter that is sent out to all online users and this is the following news for this month.

TEN's "Online Lecture Series" TEN has kicked off its "Online Lecture Series" with an exclusive chats every other Friday and 6 PM Pacific time. On March 27 with some of the Papyrus folks behind NASCAR Racing 2 and the NASCAR Racing Online Series. Upcoming guests planned include representatives from the NASCAR Racing Online Series and Westwood Studios,and editors from leading computer games magazines. Here's how to get to the lecture section:

  1. Sign on to TEN
  2. Pull down TEN's Go menu and choose "Chat Arenas"
  3. From the list of Chat Arenas, double-click on "Lecture Series" (it'll
     be there on Friday)

Once in the Arena, you'll need to page a "TEN-" guy and relay your
question. If it's good, we'll toss it out to Thresh and he'll send back a
response for all to see!

NASCAR "Rookie Meetings" Papyrus and TEN members will be online every Monday at 4-6 PM Pacific in the NROS "Rookie Meeting" Arenas to help you with the basics of getting configured and into a race.. Are you a first-time NASCAR Racing Online Series racer? Are you having trouble getting around TEN or getting into a race? Well, they feel your pain and they will be there to help! They will be doing this every Monday, so if you can't make it to this one, drop in the week after!

"3DFX patch" The long awaited 3dfx patch has arrived for Nascar 2 with some mixed feelings on how it functions. There is now a new 3DFX enabler for the TEN online series. The file is called nros3Dfxzip.exe and is a self extracting file.

SSCRA98 TEN online league: SSCRA98 will be starting up a TEN online series soon as we get enough racers. Rules and schedule is in progress at this time. More details to come on this. If interested in joining the series, contact thayer@ntsource.com for more details and registration.

3/5/98

The new NASCAR Racing Online Series Enabler Files are now Available for Both Regular and Rendition Beta Versions by NewsGuy.

New enablers are now available for the NASCAR Racing Online Series! The enabler package below contains both a regular enabler for NASCAR Racing 2 and a reworked version of the Rendition beta enabler that should be more stable. Both enablers provide an error message to help identify disconnects that are due to Internet/ISP packet loss. You must have the new enablers to play on TEN. Download the new enabler package below: Download NROS enabler files (3.7MB). The new file is located below on this page or located on the TEN network support pages.

Once you download the file, double-click it to install the enabler(s) to your NASCAR Racing 2 directory.

Additional News

TEN currently working on the NASCAR: Grand National Series Expansion Pack tracks and will release them when they are ready. TEN is aware that the NROS community is experiencing a number of problems and we're sorry for any inconvenience these problems may be causing. We'd like to thank those of you that have sent us helpful information in debugging these problems.

The issues TEN is currently working on are:

Races not scoring
Races scoring if booted in practice or qualification
General booting issues
Warping problems
Fixed Setup Tab (currently says Player Breakdowns)

3/3/98

On Thursday, March 5th, TEN is planning on releasing new game enablers for NROS. These new enablers should fix some of the types of booting problems and should make the Rendition version more stable. At this time TEN will also release a 3Dfx-specific game enabler.The NASCAR: Grand National Series Expansion Pack tracks should be available for play on TEN at the end of March. There is a new Run TIme Package for TEN which is now up to version 1.3.5.2.

2/15/98

So far TEN has updated their Run Time package a couple of times since the new rendition package has come out. They are up to version 1.3.4.4. I dont know if they added enhancements for Nascar 2 online, but they did add stuff for Quake 2. They have fixed bugs in the way rankings were calculated so it is now accurate. The arena size has been increased to 55 racers. Many leagues are running on the NRO at this time. Couple of things coming up in the future are as follows:

Adding a 3DFX patch for the NRO
Adding the Busch tracks to the NRO

The NROS online site has added a very good problem solver document if you you get disconnected to much while racing. Go take a look at it on their info page if you are having problems on TEN.

I now have links to all my articles which are listed below. That's about it for now, see you at the track.

This page last updated Saturday, May 8th, 1998